A jury awarded Rita Cantrell $100,000 in actual damage and hit Target with $3 million in punitive damages after a Target employee sent a group email falsely accusing her of passing counterfeit bills. Rita was trying to buy stuff with a 1974 $100 bill which the store employees didn’t recognize and thought was a fake. A loss-prevention employee then sent around a group email containing her picture and the false allegation to 31 different local, state and federal law enforcement offices, malls, department stores, home-improvement stores and grocery stores. The email result in the Secret Service interrogating Rita at her work place, but they were able to check out the bill and determine it was genuine. “Every aspect of Rita’s life was harmed by Target,” said Cantrell’s attorney.

Earlier this year, I was at a gas station in central California. I went inside to purchase some coffee and snacks for my long ride home, and paid with a $5 bill. It was the old-style bill with the small picture of Lincoln. Probably a 1995 bill or something.

The cashier refused to take it. Her exact quote:

“Wow, this must be the new $5 bill we’ve been hearing about. I’m sorry, but we can’t accept this.”

In 1989, while in high school, I worked at a convenience store. A customer came in and paid with four 50-cent pieces. Naturally, I wanted to get hold of them, so I asked a co-worker to come over and witness as I took $2.00 from my wallet and exchanged them for the coins; something I had done on several occasions. Her question for me: “What is a half-dollar worth?” She was not asking its intrinsic value; she was asking its face value.

What we have here and now is nothing different than when I was a high-school kid scraping together a few bucks at a minimum-wage job and working alongside ignorance.

@kc2idf: Did the same thing when I was a church money counter…
HOWEVER, if it was more than exchanging for face value, the quarter was worth 5 dollars, I would give it to the pastor and replace it with like denomination.
He would take it to Bromfield St and have the money appraised. I would pay 50-75% of the cost of the appraisal.
Soooo MUCH Silver that way…
Never any Gold, although I did get bunches of 5 dollar notes…

@Gokuhouse: What I’m wondering is why didn’t the employee have one of those counterfeit money markers that most stores have? If it marked it as counterfeit, then the employee would be well within reason to expect that it was counterfeit and take appropriate measures.

Note that I said “appropriate” which their actions were not regardless of the situation.

@OhYeahAlright: They should work on the older bills as well. But I do remeber that on some of the older bills I checked with one it sort of looked counterfit. So, at that point you have to make a judgement call.

The bill was different, granted. I can’t be certain that I’d know what to do in this situation, but I would never consider calling this woman a liar and counterfeit mastermind. People everyday, are asked to show ID when they are using their credit cards to purchase. If they resist, many times they can’t make their purchase.

Instead of Target being hit with a $3+ million judgement, the title of this story could of been “Woman denied her purchases for fear she was using a counterfeit bill”. She would of been pissed the hell off, but in the end, Target wouldn’t of done anything wrong, or profiled her in such a vile way.

Would of looked much better for Target. But who cares, right? Target’s a crock. I truly hope the employees involved get the punishment they deserve.

“People everyday, are asked to show ID when they are using their credit cards to purchase. If they resist, many times they can’t make their purchase.”

Though i’m not familiar with the merchant policy with MasterCard, the merchant agreement that VISA has does NOT require the purchaser to show I.D.
This is usually a merchant requirement (“company policy”) – which goes AGAINST the agreement with VISA. (this subject has been covered on this website already).

I’m surprised there isn’t by now some kind of booklet or something that the Treasury can give to merchants to help look up what an older bill would look like.

When i was a teen, i worked at my step-fathers tire shop (a well-known chain at the time). I witnessed a customer come in and make a cash purchase.
When the employee asked for I.D.and an address to put on the invoice/receipt, the customer claimed since it was a CASH purchase, the store didn’t need the information.
As the employee tried to explain that it only for our records, the customer became adamant and agitated – insisting that cash purchases did NOT require the info.

The guy paid with a very unusual-looking 50 or 100-dollar bill, too. Coupled with his demeanor, the whole thing seemed suspicious.

After he left, we called the FBI. They sent a Treasury agent out to inspect the bill.

He verified it was a valid bill – although a very old one that didn’t look quite like the bills of the day (early-mid 70’s).

Sounds like a similar situation @ Target. But back in-the-day, we didn’t have e-mail and a working public internet. Thus, we didn’t have the time to get into that much trouble.

@esd2020: Exactly. You can still spend $20 gold coins, and they’re worth the face value: $20. Of course, only an idiot would do that, since the metal content is worth far more, and a collector will pay more than the metal value. But nothing prevents you from spending it.

At about 8 years old I found my mother’s stash of silver dollars. Over the next month I used them to buy a bunch of donuts at the local grocery’s bakery. I later learned the hard way that, though the donuts were very good, I had not made an equitable trade.

@sir_pantsalot: The amount of time you should should be a function of how many teeth the person has, preferably in direct variation. Sadly, the amount of time you need is more often inversely proportional to the amount of teeth :(

Back when tickets went on sale for the Atlanta olympics, people from New Mexico had problems ordering tickets. Many of the order takers kept saying they could only sell tickets to people in the USA. Pleads to recognze New Mexico’s statehood were falling on deaf ears.

@sventurata: We were at a tournament with some friends from New Mexico, the people handing out the winnings kept wanting to see the guy’s visa because he was from “a different country”. We went round and round for half an hour before I got out my phone and googled it for her. I still don’t think she was really convinced, she just wanted us to leave.

@sventurata: Well, look at it this way. Since the c$ has fallen to about US$.90, you’ve actually avoided some losses on the exchange rate. Those Washington dollars are now worth about $1.10 canadian instead of the other way around.

And they’ll always stiff you on the exchange rate if you don’t go to a bank. So calling US$ and c$ equal when C$ was at US$1.10 isn’t surprising.

As strange as it may sound, even the Treasury Dept has stated – right on their own website – that merchants are NOT required to accept coins (or for that matter, foldable currency either!).

(this has been covered already somewhere else on this website).

It’s TWUE. I looked it up myself…and was VERY surprised to find that factoid.

From the website of the U.S. Treasury:

“There is,…no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services.
Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.”

Those foldable bills you and i carry around in our pockets – are WORTHLESS. Not worth the paper they’re printed on.

Need more proof?

Back to the the Treasury Dept’s. website:

“Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything This has been the case since 1933.
The notes have no value for themselves, but for what they will buy.”

The problem is that everyone is taught to comply with policy without “thinking”. The bill looked fake to the employee so they did what they were told, except this one decided to take it to the next level. Oops! Thinking only went as far as noticing the bill was different. Of course this whole debacle was systemic and it looked like most of the people involved had the same problem. Wow. How sad.

@vastrightwing: Next level? More like next order of magnitude. The next level would be to call the local police to report a suspected counterfeit bill. Not to spam out an email with a picture and a false accusation of a felony.

I have a particularly odd canadian $50 – it has Mounties all over the back and a different design on the front – and I *know* if I had any interest in spending it, whatever store would think it was fake.

@tc4b: Did I say that? I think the Target employee was phenomenally out of line – when I got it at an ATM, I went inside the bank to ensure that it wasn’t a forgery myself. That being said, I’d want to see a transcript of the entire altercation – people don’t generally go to that kind of time & energy unless there were serious extenuating circumstances (either a belief that that was a requirement by law or target’s proceedures, or the person handing in the supposed forgery was acting out of line as well.)

This will almost certainly be reduced on appeal. In a number of cases, the Supreme Court has held that punitive damages should be a small multiple of actual damages, on the order of 2-3 times. In the end, the result will be closer to $500K. Large punitive award from juries happen regularly, and are regularly reduced on appeal.

@cf27: So, what’s the actual damages of being unable to enter any local store without being escorted out by security? Malls, department stores, home improvement stores and grocery stores covers just about anywhere you might be able to buy FOOD.

@cf27: When you end up getting “interviewed” at work about it, and have your name emailed all over the country wrongly accusing you of something, I think that is worth much more than a 1-9 damages multiplier.

Well, at least we know that the women doesn’t need to shop at target anymore!

People need to learn about foreign currency, especially their neighboring countries. Here in Canada, we get special designed logos on some quarters that are in normal circulation. A few years back, we had a poppy design on them and others had the breast cancer ribbon. I tried to exchange currency when I was in America and they rejected it saying that isn’t real money.

Target executives were completely stupid for actually letting this go to court instead of making this woman whole again.

In its answer to the complaint, Target denied wrongdoing and said that the email communication was “made in good faith.”

So it’s OK to destroy this woman’s reputation as long as it was done in “goode faith”? Are they serious? I also find it hard to believe that the employee only e-mailed one person but they couldn’t prove it in court.

I wouldn’t take this comment to be worth much more than the paper it is written on. I read a few years ago that companies were beginning to fight every lawsuit brought against them, even when they knew they were in the wrong, because it resulted in fewer cases being brought. A company that settles is a prime target for frivolous lawsuits.

@SadSam: I had a great aunt who would give my cousins and me $2 bills every single year as our Christmas present. The first year it was neat, the second it was annoying, and by the time I was an adult, it was just odd.

@SadSam:
My parents love’m too — my kids always get $2 bills for birthdays and what not — just this week my son spent a wad of them at Target on some Wii Craop. Other than a brief pause trying to figure out where to put them in the register, they were accepted with nonchalance.

I don’t want to go through the trouble of having to convince someone that they’re real.

A while back, I decided it might be fun to actually start paying for stuff with two dollar bills, just to see what happened. Two phone calls and a short drive to the bank later, and I had about 100 two dollar bills, which I used in place of ones and fives for the next month or so.

Out of 60 or 70 interactions, the most common reaction was nothing more than mild to medium surprise. The second most common reaction (maybe 8-10 times) was some variant of the cashier putting two singles into the till and pocketing the the two dollar bill. One of the least common reactions was absolute nonchalance. Only once was the cashier ignorant enough to think they were fake, and the manager was quick enough to correct her.

If you’re looking for an novel way to start a conversation with cashiers and store owners, this is it.

@LatinoGeek: Yup, still in circulation, though if you plan to get a bunch of $2 bills (like, more than 5 or so), it’s best to call ahead and make sure the bank has them. They might have to order the bills specially.

What exactly do you say to your boss or employer after the Secret Service comes into the office to interview you? Hopefully they are nice enough to tell your employer that there was never a problem and not just leave and let you fend for yourself.

I love to use $2.00 bills, since they take up less space and are good for making you think about those little under a dollar impulse purchases. However, I have run into people who think they are fake and claim there is no such thing as a two dollar bill.

I wonder if this Target LP guy was the same one I once knew who got fired from being a Wal-Mart LP guy because he was way overzealous in his job. He busted a person that was a “known shoplifter”, except they had nothing on them.

I’ve worked several retail jobs throughout college and this seems pretty accurate. These big retail stores use “Loss” as one of many excuses for cutting hours, and low wages. Basically, “If shit didn’t get stolen then we’d have the money to pay you.” Combine that with overzealous LP guys and you have ackward situations like this one. I worked at Staples, Target, and Barnes & Noble and at all three at some point Loss Prevention was given as an excuse for cut hours and/or not giving raises.

The employees are at fault in this situation, but this might be an underlying reason for the larger problem.

@Presidentpez: No necessarily. If Target failed to provide them pictures of currency and security features, it stands to reason they would think it was fake. This is an education issue that target needs to deal with.

I got on a bus and put a dollar in once, and it didn’t register so the driver was convinced that it was fake! Never underestimate the power of human stupidity…wouldn’t I just make up some fake 20s and call a cab??

Maybe I don’t know enough about counterfeiting, but in these stories, the employees only think a bill is fake when it looks weird or different.

Wouldn’t any counterfeiter worth his or her salt try as hard as possible to make their bills look as normal as possible? Or do they normally like to stand at the cash register and explain that, oh no, this is actually just an older bill, while trying to pass fake money? Why would they? You’re just maximizing the time spent dealing with and talking about the money you’re trying to pass unobtrusively.

So…shouldn’t employees be LESS suspicious of obviously weird-looking money (e.g. state quarters, $2 bills, old hundreds) than they are of money that looks normal but seems off in some other way, on the ground that no right-thinking counterfeiter would be so stupid as to make completely strange money that would immediately arouse attention?

Most chain retail establishments have a verification book- showing various versions of each state’s ID, common passports, and bills that are in circulation from the last 25 years or so. Target doesn’t have this? The pizza place I worked at in high school even did.

Shame on them. Sending an alert to other local Targets to watch for the woman is one thing- sending it to law enforcement agencies, other stores, etc. without proof of actual fraud is dispicable.

@KStrike155: That does nothing to stop a one hundred dollar bill created by washing a one dollar bill and printing a new bill on top. The 1974 bill would lack all the security features of a new bill. If I was a retailer I would not take the money and instead tell the customer to go to the bank to get a modern bill.

So, just a question if anybody knows (and sorry if it’s already been addressed and I just don’t see it) but do the counterfeit markers work on older bills, or just the new ones? If they work on the older bills, that would have been an easy way to avoid the ensuing issues.

There was never any need for any of this to happen. Stores have “counterfeit pens”. They are basically sharpies that use a special kind of ink that reacts different with regular paper than it does with actual money.

A little bit of logic wouldn’t hurt either. If you were counterfeiting $100 bills, (which by the way would be stupid to do because almost everyone checks those), wouldn’t you try to make sure that your reproduction was as true to the original as possible? I’m just saying..

@YOXIM: Furthermore, most of these pens only ever worked on one particularly cheap type of counterfeit bill in the first place (one that used starch to simulate thickness or that was printed on regular copier paper). The pens are pretty much a ripoff, as it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between real bills and copier paper, and they provide a false sense of security against any serious attempt at counterfeiting.

I would not hesitate to suggest that that same employee had recently gone through counterfeit bill training and they used new bills…
And it wouldn’t surprise me if the person wasn’t even born when that bill was in common circulation.
How many people remember Mercury dimes??
Ben Franklin Halves???
Morgan Dollars??? Except those are for sale on TV every other day…
If the person did lose their job, it wouldn’t surprise me to see them fight and win to retain it… Lack of training. Not their fault…

The never-heard-of-a-two-dollar-bill stories usually have the police showing up and telling off the numbskull cashier. It’s funny how Target was convinced it was a fake $100 bill but not only didn’t call the police but also clearly let her leave with the bill. Or maybe they weren’t really sure it was fake but thought it was ok to spread suspicion, aka libel.

Another little jem in the story is that the email also accused her of shoplifting. There’s no mention that they accused her of that in person, and whatever images of her shopping were sent, doubtful a jury would have awarded $3M if they showed shoplifting. (If they had, Target might have squeaked by with a ‘clearly she had two 1974 $100 bills and showed the real one to the secret service, shoplifters are sneaky like that’) So it sounds like Target inflated the accusation and jury hit them for it.

On the other end, you’d be surprised at the kind of terribly counterfeited bills people try to pass off as real. I had a gas station attendant come to my family’s restaurant one day for take-out, and tried to pay with a counterfeit $100 bill.

Needless to say, the bill had no watermark, and felt like it was printed on standard copy/printer paper. The guy pretended like he had no idea, but it was obvious he was trying to get one past us. Luckily for him, he had some real money on him to pay for his food. Turned out to be unlucky for me, because that food would have ended up in my stomach had he been unable to pay.

I work in security and to send out a mass e-mail like that is unheard of! You are risking a lot of liability sending out bulletins like that. Of course this extreme is obvious with the 3.1 million dollar payout! I should use 100 dollar bills at target more often. I sure could use 3.1 million dollars.

There was a similar story not too long ago of a guy who paid for something at Best Buy strictly in $2 bills. The guy was a DC tour operator so he gave out $2 bills to students on his tours for buying meals. Needless to say the guy had a bunch of $2 bills fresh from the bank in his possession.

Best Buy had incensed him over some dispute over a car stereo so to be an ass he decided to pay his bill in nothing but $2 bills.

The cashier had never heard of $2 bills and being fresh from the bank some of the bills did not have ink that was 100% dry.

I think the guy was held for several hours and the Secret Service said that sometimes the ink on very fresh bills will smear. Which makes sense because the Intaglia printing method puts ink ON the paper not INTO the paper.

Steve Wozniak of Apple fame has had a few run ins. He buys (or bought) $2 dollar bills by the sheet. He had one run in with a clerk who was certain they were fake (serialized, and the ink was rubbing off). Allegedly the FBI interviewed him and the bills, pronouncing them real.